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Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust? (Guest Column @ O'Reilly Radar)

In light of the Facebook's past consumer-unfriendly initiatives, its recent 'privacy' settings change should serve as a wake up call to its 350M users that they are entrusting a Fox to guard the Hen House; a truth that is destined to erupt into a crisis for the company.

Isn't it about time that we started holding our online brands to the same standards that we hold our offline ones?

Case in point, consider Facebook. In Facebook's relatively short life, there has been the Beacon Debacle (a 'social' advertising model that only Big Brother could love), the Scamville Furor (lead gen scams around social gaming) and now, the Privacy Putsch.

By Privacy Putsch, I am referring to Facebook's new 'Privacy' Settings, which unilaterally invoked upon all Facebook users a radically different set of privacy setting defaults than had been in place during the company's build-up to its current 350 million strong user base.

To put a bow around this one, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), not exactly a bastion of radicalism, concluded after comparing Facebook's new privacy settings with the privacy settings that they replaced:

"Our conclusion? These new 'privacy' changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data." EFF adds that, "The privacy 'transition tool' that guides users through the configuration will 'recommend' — preselect by default — the setting to share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet, even though the default privacy level that those users had accepted previously was limited to 'Your Networks and Friends' on Facebook."